Paul
Goble
Staunton, June 1 – In his latest argument
for the formation of “a civic Russian nation” [rossiiskaya natsiya], Valery Tishkov argues that the only way
forward is for Moscow to lay more stress on commonality rather than diversity for
the Russian population as a whole and more stress on divisions within its
component nations than on communalities within any of them.
In a lengthy article in NG-Tsenarii, the former nationalities
minister and former director of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and
Anthropology says that for too long many in Russia have been too “obsessed”
with ethnic differences rather than with commonalities of the people of the Russian
Federation as a whole (ng.ru/stsenarii/2017-05-30/13_6998_edinstvo.html).
And
he says that those who say that national republics within the Russian
Federation are “our inheritance from the USSR and that no one must occupy
themselves with such risky things again” are wrong and that changes in such
arrangements, reflecting changes in the broader society are not only inevitable
but valuable in promoting broader unity.
As
is often the case, Tishkov stops short of drawing the obvious conclusions from
his argument for Russia, preferring in almost every case to talk about them for
other countries, as when he complains that no other post-Soviet state has
become a federation and when he says that others are taking the lead in
recognizing the complexities of ethnic identities.
But
from the perspective of the non-Russian nations within the borders of the
Russian Federation and even what Moscow often dismissively calls “the
sub-ethnoses” of the Russian nation, Tishkov’s argument here provides the
intellectual basis for a new and broader attack on the integrity of both and
even on the current ethno-federal structure of the country.
The
ethnographer begins his argument by pointing to the conclusions of a new book
his institute has released, The Cultural
Complexity of Contemporary Nations. That study stressed the ways that
urbanization, migration, and the mixing of peoples have changed how many people
see themselves, increasingly viewing themselves as of mixed ethnicity or as
cosmopolitans.
“This
phenomenon of contemporary cultural complexity or super-complexity at the
individual and collective levels … forces us to rethink the content of
categories according to which the population has in the past been divided in
various countries of the world,” Tishkov continues.
He
acknowledges that “the most powerful of these categories is of course the
category of the nation,” but he insists that today the nation is the population
of any state as a whole: “I do not know of any countries which have joined the UN
and do not consider themselves nation states,” Tishkov says.
The
implications of that, of course, are that those who have states now can and
should make their populations into single nations, while those nations that don’t
have statehood now are to be absorbed or amalgamated into the nation defined in
terms of the state they live in, a backdoor restoration of Friedrich Engels’
discredited concept of ‘history-less nations.”
Tishkov
talks about the value of the formula “unity in diversity” but it seems he is
more supportive of that in countries beyond the borders of the Russian
Federation – Ukraine should become a federal state with Russian as an official
language, he says – than he is for peoples within the Russian state.
“We
have been held back by the creation of diversity,” he says, with many in Russia
talking about the need to come up with a film about each nation and “show its
distinctiveness relative to other peoples. This of course is also interesting
but why are we do little itneressted in the common whole, in what makes us
strong and friendly.”
Might
it not be the case that “it is time to speak not only about ‘friendship of the
peoples,’” as the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation have, “but also about
‘a friendly people,’” thus stressing the commonality of the whole while
downplaying the distinctions of the nations who make it up?
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